The chip that changed the world: AMD’s 64-bit FX-51, ten years later

Share This article

AMD’s x86-64 instruction set, meanwhile, was a brilliant counterstroke against Intel’s own long-range plans. As originally conceived, Intel’s IA64 was an Itanium-only architecture, but Itanium, in the long run, was to form the bedrock of Intel’s 64-bit plans. AMD’s x86-compatible version of 64-bit computing preserved perfect 32-bit compatibility. 64-bit Windows wouldn’t be available until April 2005, and wouldn’t start to gain much traction until Windows Vista in early 2007. But AMD neatly captured “seamless upgrade” as a marketing feature in a way Intel couldn’t.

Then, of course, there was Prescott. Part of what gave the Athlon 64 family legs was that Intel’s next-generation CPU architecture, which debuted in 2004, launched with all the grace of a dead manatee. The Socket 478 version of Prescott was hot enough to ignite the power supplies inside supposedly certified SFF (Small Form Factor) systems and melt the plastic under motherboard testbeds. It clocked higher than the old Northwood P4, but ran markedly slower and drew far more power. At the time, I could rest my hand on identical power supplies of identically configured Prescott and Northwood systems running the same workload, and tell which system was which by the temperature of the PSU chassis. LGA775 did nothing to change matters, while AMD’s Socket 939 made dual-channel memory standard across the entire Athlon 64 product line.

While Intel choked, AMD soared. Opteron sales shot up and desktop sales strengthened. In May 2005, Intel beat AMD to the punch by a matter of weeks with the first dual-core Pentium 4 Smithfield — but AMD crushed that chip’s performance with the Athlon 64 X2 family. Moving to full dual-cores gave AMD the performance crown in areas where its single-core offerings had previously lost to Intel’s Hyper-Threading-equipped Pentium 4’s. As Anandtech wrote, “With the Pentium D, we had to give up a noticeable amount of single threaded performance…in order to get better multithreaded/multitasking performance, but with AMD, you don’t have to make that sacrifice. Everything from gaming to compiling performance on the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ was extremely solid.”

2003-2006 was a golden age for the company. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

David vs. Goliath: It’s a nice story

One thing we know more about now than we did then is just how much pressure Intel brought to bear on everyone, behind the scenes. There were always off-the-record conversations with nervous motherboard vendors about why their AMD product samples shipped in plain white boxes, or why the motherboards lacked brand names. When SuperMicro introduced an Opteron motherboard in 2005, the company refused to acknowledge its existence. Intel’s own compilers refused to run SSE or SSE2 code on compatible AMD processors; applications would check for the “GenuineIntel” string when running these programs rather than simply checking to see if SSE2 was supported on the processor. That’s a particularly low blow considering AMD paid Intel for licenses.

In its 500-plus-page findings of fact, the European Union laid out repeated demonstrations of how Intel used predatory rebate practices to keep companies from carrying more than certain percentage of AMD hardware. The basic scheme worked like this: If an Intel chip normally cost $100, but you bought 90% Intel processors, Intel would cut you a $25 rebate check per chip at the end of the quarter. If, however, you sold 85% Intel processors, you got nothing. A company that sold 100,000 chips in a quarter and kept 90% Intel volume could expect a $22.5 million dollar rebate check.

In order to compete with Intel’s rebates, AMD had to offer an equivalent price savings, but on a vastly smaller number of chips. In one situation, AMD offered to give HP a million processors, for free, if it would use them to build systems. HP responded that it couldn’t afford to do so, because the total value of a million free processors was smaller than the value of Intel’s rebates. Whether or not this would have been found to be a violation of US antitrust law is a matter of conjecture, AMD and Intel settled their differences out of court. But Intel’s systemic sabotage of its rival undermined AMD’s ability to maximize its own profits during the 2003-2006 window.

That’s not to say AMD didn’t bear responsibility for its own situation. It’s not Intel’s fault that AMD paid twice what it should have for ATI, or that the company’s Fusion timeline had to be repeatedly restarted. AMD made poor design decisions with K10 and Bulldozer, and those aren’t Intel’s fault, either. However, it’s fair to say that if AMD had been making several hundred million dollars more per quarter than it actually earned from 2003-2006, these situations might have played out differently. So it goes.

In the end, competing with Intel was less “David and Goliath,” and more “David vs. a giant rubber wall.” But ten years ago, the Athlon 64 3200+ and FX-51 hauled off and knocked Goliath squarely on his giant butt. Over the next few years, AMD would deliver a solid drubbing and leave Intel squarely on the defensive. And its 64-bit technology forms the basis of all x86 computing today. The compatibility mode that AMD adopted for ensuring that 32-bit code would run seamlessly on its 64-bit processor is very similar to the model ARM has used for its own 64-bit chips. While some decried the popularity of x86-64 as a lost opportunity to get rid of x86 once and for all, the model has been extremely successful over the long term.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

Erick Ordoñez

Wow…. such a nostalgic article, nice :D … I still remember reading those brochures were the P4 was suppoused to be la crem de la crem of CPU’s back then. AMD was indeed a force to be reckoned. Heck… my brother still has an Athlon X2 4200+ CPU running smooth.

Joel Hruska

The P4 Northwood was still a good chip against the Athlon 64. It was the Prescott that really sealed the deal, and then the 820 Smithfield that blew the pooch. By 2005, AMD Athlon 64 X2’s were smacking the crap out of the Pentium family.

Damon

ahhh Prescott… when the furnace breaks, just fire it up and leave it running a looped benchmark…

Joel Hruska

You really *could* tell if a PSU was hooked to a Northwood or Prescott system just by resting your hand on it. The temperature gradient was noticeable.

Damon

yes you could. Prescott is what got me into peltier/TEC cooling systems for awhile.

Dustymack

Still have the 3200+ and my AMD Athlon! Go AMD……

Dustymack

Still have the 3200+ and my AMD Athlon! Go AMD……

rahuldey85

Fantastic article. Reminds me why I am still an AMD fan.

rahuldey85

Fantastic article. Reminds me why I am still an AMD fan.

fw

Reminds me why I used to be an AMD fan.

Phobos

I used to have the Athlon 3200 it was alright until my motherboard SATA controllers die, I had it with a Radeon 9550 then made the jump to the x1300 then and last the x1950pro. Just running with 2Gs of ram, it last me for some good 5yrs.

Ian Skinner

never picked up a P4 chip, stuck with my P3’s, better product overall, then jumped to the AMD X2 products and after the underhanded practices of intel, I did my best to never own an Intel product again.

christianh

And I NEVER WILL…

Joel Hruska

I had an Intel Tualatin — one of the “Celeron” variants that had a 256K L2 at a time when the Pentium flavor had moved to a 512K L2. So the “Celeron” version of the core was essentially identical to a Pentium 3 Coppermine at 180nm (and far cheaper).

The Celeron chip clocked in, I think, at maybe 1.2GHz. I OC’d the chip to about 1.6GHz and had great times with it for awhile. I eventually swapped it out for a T-Bred “B” at 2.26GHz or so, but it was a great chip for a little while. I actually used it at one point because it ran very cool for the time, and my dorm room was quite hot.

christianh

The problem with ATi was that they had to price it WITH the Intel chipset business… But THE DAY the deal closed Intel CANCELED all external chipsets…

So now ATi didn’t have that revenue stream…

Crooked monopolists…

James Tolson

my rig houses an amd FX60 socket 939 processor.. never let me down in terms of performance ever.. i like it because it is/was a unique enthusiast chip, they still go for good money on ebay, which is where i got mine :-)

Dozerman

One of the reasons I expected so much out of Bulldozer is pretty much this article. Although steamroller has me raising an eyebrow, I don’t know if we’ll ever see those days again.

Dozerman

One of the reasons I expected so much out of Bulldozer is pretty much this article. Although steamroller has me raising an eyebrow, I don’t know if we’ll ever see those days again.

Jamie MacDonald

I still have an Athlon X2 5000+ in my desktop. Only now is it really struggling to keep up, soon to be retired.

TechDead

When I turned 18, I bought one of the AMD FX-55’s along with SLI 6800gt
NVidia cards. I loved that machine. I still have the mobo and proc
from that build as a souvenir.

Mathieu Levac

I used to own a FX57 and an FX60 Alienware laptop with 7950’s in sli :D

Damien Krstanovic

Still got mine FX 51. Working fine :D

bobby

Great article! Brings back memories and hopefully will school some of the younger PC enthusiasts that there was a time when AMD through almost word of mouth alone stomped Intel into the ground in the enthusiast space.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.